Carbon footprint for your pillow?

From travel booking mega sites Expedia and Travelocity to boutique hotels, the travel industry is catering to tourists who are becoming more concerned about their carbon footprint.

“Customers are expecting this and hotels are starting to deliver,” says Sean Kane, a co-founder of online reservation engine greenhotelbookings.com, of more sustainable hospitality practices.

With an estimated 1.6 billion international travelers by 2020, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the industry has a long way to go to reduce the footprint of all that globetrotting. Ecotourism is among the fastest growing travel trends—a $77 billion industry representing about 5 percent of the U.S. travel and tourism market, according to the International Ecotourism Society.

Green Hotel Bookings accepts numerous third-party certifications including Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), Energy Star, Green Seal and several state programs. It also offers its own three-level certification system. At its lowest level, the site requires “eco-friendly” cleaning products and one Energy Star appliance. Kane says the company’s goal is to encourage initial certification, then help hotels adopt broader changes, including exploring incentives from power and water companies.

Aiming to create a framework of sustainable tourism practices, UNWTO recently launched its Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria. An attempt to cull the best practices from among about 60 different certification programs, the criteria aim to help businesses, consumers and governments assess and promote sustainability through the tourism industry.

The criteria would create “widely accepted standards to distinguish 'green' from 'greenwashed'” and “will allow for true certification of sustainable practices in hotels and resorts as well as other travel suppliers,” says Jeff Glueck, chief marketing officer of Southlake, Texas-based Travelocity, the country’s sixth largest travel agency booking $10.1 billion in travel worldwide in 2006, and a partner in the UN initiative.